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EnglandArthur James Balfour (1902-1919)
Campbell-Bannerman (1905-1908)
George V (1910-1936)
Herbert Henry Asquith
David Lloyd George
Bonar Law
Stanley Baldwin
James Ramsey MacDonald
George VI (1936-1952)
Neville Chamberlain (1937-1940)
Winston Churchill (1940-1955)
Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery ("Monty")
Clement Attlee (1945-1951)
FranceRaymond Poincaré
Georges Clemenceau (1906-1920)
Marshal Ferdinand Foch
Marshal Henri Pétain ( -1944)
GermanyWilhelm II (1888-1918)
Friedrich Ebert (1919-1925)
Paul von Hindenburg (1925-1934)
Adolph Hitler (1934-1945)
Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1934-1945)
Josef Paul Goebbels (1934-1945)
Heinrich Himmler (1934-1945)
Albert Speer (1934-1945)
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ( -1944)
ItalyVictor Emmanuel III (1900-1946)
Vittorio Orlando
Benito Mussolini (1922-1943)
SpainFrancisco Franco (1939- )
Russia
/ The Soviet UnionNicholas II (1894-1917)
Pyotr Stolypin (1906-1911)
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1917-1924)
Leon Trotsky (1917-1925)
Joseph Stalin (1922-1953)
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1939-1956)
Other
EuropeanEamon de Valera
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923-1938)
The
United StatesTheodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt (1901-1909)
Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
General John J. Pershing
Henry Ford ( - 1947)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945)
General George S. Patton
General Douglas MacArthur
General George S. Marshall (1939-1951)
Harry S. Truman (1945-1953)
Dean G. Acheson (1945-1953)
AsiaGandhi
Sun Yat-sen (1911-1925)
Chiang Kai-shek (1928-1975)
Emperor Hirohito (1926-1989)
General Tojo Hideki (1941-1944)
Yamamoto Isoroku (1941-1943)
History
of the First Half of the 20th Century: General Sources
ENGLAND1848-1930. Prime Minister, 1902-1905.
Arthur James Balfour (1902-1919)
Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1887-1892. First Lord of the Treasury, 1891-1892. Leader of the Conservative Opposition, 1892-1895. First Lord of the Admiralty, 1915-1916. Secretary of Foreign Affairs, 1916-1919. Chancellor of Cambridge University, 1919.
Author of the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917) whereby Britain recognized the right of the Jews to establish a national homeland in Palestine--though supposedly in such a way that it would not adversely affect the non-Jews already living in the area (?!).
Balfour's major works or writings:
Defence of the Philosophic Doubt (1879)
The Foundations of Belief (1895)
Theism and Thought (1923)1836-1908. Liberal Party. British Prime Minister, 1905-1908. Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905-1908)
1865-1936. Son of Edward VII. King of England, 1910-1936.
George V (1910-1936)
1852-1928. Liberal Party. British Prime Minister (1908-1916)
Herbert Henry Asquith
Liberal Party. British Prime Minister, 1916-1922.
David Lloyd George (1916-1922)
Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1922-1923. Bonar Law
1867-1947. Conservative Party. British Prime Minister, 1923-1924, 1924-1929, 1935-1937. Stanley Baldwin (1923-1937)
Labour Party. British Prime Minister, 1924 and 1929-1935. James Ramsey MacDonald (1924-1935)
1895-1952. Second son of George V--and brother of Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne to him in 1936. George VI (1936-1952)
Arthur Neville Chamberlain. 1869-1940. Prime Minister, 1937-1940.
Neville Chamberlain (1937-1940)
1874-1965. Prime Minister, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955.
Winston Churchill
Took over the prime-ministership during the dark hours of the "Battle of Britain" (summer of 1940)--as German bombers attempted to lay waste to English industrial cities in preparation for a Nazi invasion. Also during the summer of 1940, he negotiated a secret agreement with US President Roosevelt to receive a number of American battleships (destroyers)--in exchange for American rights to military bases in British territories overseas.
Links to other information on Churchill:
Winston Churchill (Time 100: John Keegan)1887-1976.
Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery ("Monty") (1942-1945)
He rallied a retreating and demoralized English Army in North Africa--and at the battle of El Alamein in Egypt (November 1942) his English forces defeated the Germans under General Erwin Rommel, turning the tide in favor of England and against Germany in North Africa. In 1943 he pursued the Germans westward across North Africa, captured Tunisia and from there crossed the Mediterranean into Italy. He led his English 8th Army step by step up the Eastern coast of Italy--until he was returned to England to become part of the leadership of the Allied invasion of Normany in June 1944.
1883-1967. Prime Minister, 1945-1951. Clement Richard Attlee
He was head of the Labour Government which nationalized a large number of major British industries at the end of World War II. He also presided over the dismantling of key parts of the British Empire (Palestine, India).
FRANCEPresident of the Republic of France.
Raymond Poincaré
1841-1929. Premier of France, 1906-1909 and 1917-1920.
Georges Clemenceau (1906-1920)
Chairman of the Versailles Peace Conference--and a determined advocate of the policy of keeping post-War Germany weak. He demanded as war reparations imposed on Germany the granting to France of the west-bank area (Alsace) of the Rhine and the coal producing Saar Basin.
Rebuffed by Wilson who was afraid that this would only plant new seeds for future conflict with Germany, the French were indeed granted Alsace, but only 15-year occupational rights in the Saar--plus a German guarantee of the demilitarization of the entire German Rhineland region (which Hitler violated in 1935).
At age 24 Clemenceau escaped to America to avoid the regime of Napoleon III--working for 4 years in the States as a journalist and teacher and then returning to France in 1869.
Commander of the allied armies of the Entente (Britain, France, Russia)
Marshal Ferdinand Foch
Henri Philippe Omer Pétain. 1856-1951. Marshal of France. Premier of the Vichy government, 1940-1944.
Marshal Henri Pétain ( -1944)
GERMANY1859-1941. King of Prussia and Emperor (Kaiser) of Germany, 1888-1918)
Wilhelm II (1888-1918)
(1871-1925)
Friedrich Ebert (1919-1925)
Head of the German Social Democratic Party and the political leader who helped Germany formulate the democratic Weimar Constitution after World War One. He was President of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1925.Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. 1847-1934. Field Marshal. President of the Weimar Republic of Germany, 1925-1934.
Paul von Hindenburg (1925-1934)
Adolph Hitler (1933-1945)
1889-1945. Austrian-born Chancellor of Germany, 1933-1934. Dictator ("der Fuhrer") of Germany, 1934-1945.
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler (Time 100: Elie Wiesel)1893-1946. German Field Marshal. Nazi party leader.
Hermann Wilhelm Göring
1897-1945. Director of Nazi propaganda.
Josef Paul Goebbels
1900-1945. Chief of the S.S. (Schutzstaffel)--Hitler's personal body guard and secret police--loyal only to the person of Hitler himself.
Heinrich Himmler
Albert Speer
1891-1944.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
German field marshal in command of the German Army (Wehrmacht) in North Africa. Earned the title "Desert Fox" because of his demonstrated talents as a military strategist.
ITALY1869-1947. King of Italy, 1900-1946.
Victor Emmanuel III (1900-1946)
1860-1952. Premier of Italy, 1917-1919. Vittorio Orlando
As leader of the Italian delegation to the post-War Paris peace discussions, he attempted to press Italian claims for lands promised in 1915 by England to Italy along the eastern Adriatic coast within the enemy Austro-Hungarian Empire.
US President Wilson instead stood firm in the granting of these lands to the newly created Yugoslavia. Orlando resigned from his premiership in anger at this rebuff.
He later became a supporter of Mussolini--until the two had a political split in 1925 and he resigned from the Italian Parliament.
1883-1945. Dictator ("Il Duce") of Italy, 1922-1943.
Benito Mussolini (1922-1943)
SPAINPaulino Hermenegildo Teodulo Franco-Bahamonde. 1892- . Chief of State 1939-1947; Co-regent of the Kingdom of Spain, 1947-
Francisco Franco (1939- )
RUSSIA / THE SOVIET UNION1868-1918. Emperor (Tsar) of Russia, 1894-1917.
Nicholas II (1894-1917)
Russian Prime Minister who undertook vast agricultural reforms to improve the life of the peasants and who attempted stronger cultural Russification of the non-Russians within the empire. Pyotr Stolypin (1906-1911)
In the end he succeeded in alienating all political groupings with his dictatorial manner and was assassinated on September 14, 1911.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1917-1924)
1870-1924.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism(1909)
State and RevolutionV.I. Lenin (Time 100: David Remnick)Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Created the Soviet Red Army. Served as the Soviet Commissar or Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1918-1925. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 under orders from Stalin. He now turned his mighty pen against Stalin and his "betrayal" of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1940 he was silenced by an assassin in Mexico City.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
War and the International (1914) (Colorado: Marx/Engels Internet Archives - M/EIA)
Pacifism as the Servant of Imperialism (1917) (M/EIA)
The New Course (1923) (M/EIA)
The Lessons of October (1924) (M/EIA)
The History of the Russian Revolution (1930) (M/EIA)
The Rise of Hitler and Destruction of the German Left (1930)(M/EIA)
Their Morals and Ours (1936) (M/EIA)
The Revolution Betrayed (1936) (M/EIA)
Trotsky in Norway (1936) (M/EIA)
Stalini sm and Bolshevism (1937) (M/EIA)Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. 1879-1953. Communist Party General Secretary, 1922-1953.
Joseph Stalin (1922-1953)
(1890- ) Commisar of Foreign Affairs, 1939-1949 and 1953-1956. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov
OTHER EUROPEAN1882-1975.
Eamon de Valera (1882-1975)
Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Irish Free State, 1932-1948. Then President of the Irish Republic, 1959-
In 1926 de Valera founded the Fianna Fail, a Irish republicanist political party which very reluctantly agreed to a compromise on the division of Ireland between 1) the Catholic and Republicanist southern counties and 2) the heavily Protestant and Unionist northern counties of Ulster.
De Valera originally was a strict opponent of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty with England which set up both the Irish Free State and the Ulster Union under the English monarchy. De Valera was an ardent Republicanist--and took that side in the bitter civil war (1922-1923) in Ireland between the pro-treaty Irish Free Staters and the anti-treaty Irish Republicanists. In the end the Republicanists lost the civil war among the Irish.
De Valera's Fianna Fail was created in 1926 to draw forward the Republicanist partisans. At the same time de Valera himself began to press the Irish Republicanists to accept some kind of compromise with political reality--and come to learn to live with the treaty.
In 1932 he and his party were elected to a majority in the Irish Dail (parliament). Now as Taoiseach, he began step by step to undo some of the features of the Anglo-Irish treaty hated by the Republicanists. He no longer continued to swear the oath of allegiance to the British crown, he abolished the office of British governor-general in Ireland--and in 1937 he extended to the Irish a new constitution.
1881-1938. President of Turkey, 1923-1938.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923-1938)
Considered the "Father" of modern Turkey. Successful Turkish general during World War One--having led the Turkish defense against the British at Galipoli. "Deliverer" of Turkey from the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish War immediately following World War I.
ASIAInspirer of Indian independence from British rule, using satyagraha or "soul force" to undermine the British position in India politically, economically and spiritually.
Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi (1867-1948)
He was assassinated in 1948 in the midst of a general breakdown of law and order following the withdrawal of British rule.
His techniques of satyagraha were studied around the world by other liberationists in the hopes that they might be applied elsewhere to collapse Western imperial rule and institute local self-rule. The African National Congress in South Africa attempted to use his methods to oppose apartheid or State-sponsored segregation in that country during the 1950s. Martin Luther King, Jr. studied them as a technique for ending White monopoly of power in the American South during the 1960s.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) (Löpa Berlin)
Mohandas Gandhi (Time 100: Salman Rushdie)
Sun Yat-sen (1911-1925)
Chiang Kai-shek (1928-1975)
1901-1989. Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito (1926-1989)
Emperor, 1926-1989.
1884-1948.
General Tojo Hideki (1941-1944)
1884-1943.
Yamamoto Isoroku (1941-1943)
Commander of the Japanese Navy during part of World War Two.
At first reluctant to go to war with the United States, once the decision for war was made by the Japanese Cabinet, Yamamoto put his full force behind the idea of crushing the United States Navy in the hoping of forcing the US to sue for peace. He was the one who conceived the plan of a surprise attack on Pearl Habor (December 1941)--using aircraft carriers as the main instrument of war. But he failed to cripple the United States naval power--first losing a major engagement with the United States Navy at Midway Island (June 1942) and then in the subsequent struggle for control of the Solomon Islands. In the latter battle his plane was shot down and he was killed.
THE UNITED STATES1858-1919.
Theodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt (1901-1909)
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
Teddy Roosevelt (Time 100: Edmund Morris)Thomas Woodrow Wilson. 1856-1924.
Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
Nobel Peace Prize, 1919.
Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces (1917-1918)
General John J. Pershing
1863-1947. Henry Ford ( -1947)
1882-1945.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Time 100: Arthur Schesinger Jr.)1885-1945.
General George S. Patton
1880-1959. U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 1939-1945. U.S. Secretary of State, 1947-1949. Secretary of Defense, 1950-1951.
General George C. Marshall
1880-1964.
General Douglas MacArthur
1884-
Harry S. Truman (1945-1953)
1893-1971. Under-Secretary of State, 1945-1947 and Secretary of State, 1949-1953.
Dean G. Acheson (1945-1953)
He helped to develop the US policy in Europe of the "containment" of Communism--by extending economic and military aid to countries under threat of a communist takeover. He was the individual who explained before Congress in 1947 the elements of the Truman Doctrine; he helped put the Marshall Plan into operation and organize the NATO alliance.
In Asia he took a more aloof position with respect to the fate of the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai Shek--which drew considerable antipathy from the Republican conservatives in Congress. He was also accused on leading the North Koreans into the attack on South Korea in 1950 (the Korean War) by failing in a key speech of his to include Taiwan and Korea in his description of the American sphere of influence that the government stood ready to defend.
He retired in 1953 and devoted himself to his law practice and his political writings. In 1970 he received the Pulitzer Prize for History with his book, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.
Pattern of Responsibility (1952)
A Democrat Looks at His Party (1955)
A Citizen Looks at Congress (1957)
Power and Diplomacy (1958)
Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known (1961)
Present in Creation (1969)
HISTORY OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY: GENERAL SOURCES
The First Half of the 20th Century (Spiritual Pilgrim)
Other Sources:
Continue on to the next section: The Second Half of the 20th Century
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